As we move through midterms season and start looking towards the horizon of finals, many of us have assessment on the brain. Instructors who are teaching remotely for the first time this winter might be wondering how best to tailor student assessment to the online format, and there might equally be instructors who have previously felt frustrated with how remote assessment panned out in the spring or autumn. To anticipate this challenge, we spoke with Ahmet Dursun, Director of the Office of Language Assessment, to get his advice on student assessment and its role in remote pedagogy.

Although Ahmet Dursun’s work focuses on language assessment, he strongly believes that it plays a critical role in any classroom, regardless of subject or course structure. He defines assessment as any method that allows the instructor insight into a student’s mastery of course content and their ability to apply the knowledge and skills learned in the class to their own work or to a non-class context. With this goal in mind, he suggests that designing a course should involve three steps:

• “Set a clear and a realistic destination for you and your students considering your context and resources. This is about identifying and defining clear, demonstrable, measurable, and realistic end-of-course outcomes.
• Define parameters and criteria to measure the quality of your journey to the destination. Develop assessment tools that can help you collect evidence during as well as at the end of the process to see whether your journey to destination is going as you planned and whether your students could reach the destination eventually.
• Strategize how to get to the destination. Design a curriculum (i.e., a strategy document) to plan and deliver the knowledge, skills, and abilities needed to get to the destination.”

It is considered good practice to determine desired course outcomes before structuring a course, and then decide what tools and assessment strategies the course needs to make that outcome attainable. This way, effective assessment is built into the course from the start, and the students and instructor are on the same page about what it means to succeed.

In the past, for face-to-face courses, Ahmet Dursun has always recommended that instructors choose classroom assessment practices that are “meaningful and useful both for themselves and their students.” It is important to keep purpose in mind when structuring tests, quizzes, or graded assignments. Here are some questions Ahmet would encourage instructors to ask themselves, in order to “make deliberate choices on what to assess and how to assess it”:

• Why do I give this test or assignment?
• What kind of knowledge, abilities, or skills will it elicit?
• How and when would I use its results?
• How should my students interpret its results?
• What kind of feedback do I then need to provide to my students?

Once the answers to these questions are clear to an instructor, it is important to relay this information to students. The goal is to have students understand what skills they are being assessed on and how the instructor will use the results of the exam. This way, instead of viewing the essays they produce or the exams they take as a means to an end (a grade), students are invested in their own learning processes and the opportunities to demonstrate their progress to the instructor.

When it comes to remote teaching, however, Ahmet Dursun thinks that many instructors’ initial instinct is to “worry about the integrity and practicality of administering tests and quizzes remotely, thinking that they have to administer their exams and quizzes in the same way they did in the face-to-face environment.” The good news is that this doesn’t have to be the case! Assessment strategies in your remote classroom will likely look different than they do in a face-to-face classroom, even for the same course. If we consider the goals of the course as we structure assessments, while keeping in mind the limitations and strengths of the new format, we may realize that there are many ways to determine student proficiency in the skills and knowledge the course teaches.

Ahmet acknowledges that “in remote teaching, it is even more critical to effectively monitor how students are doing and whether you are meeting your course objectives. Additionally, assessment plays a key role in helping students work towards the goals and connecting them to the course instructor.” He warns against high-stakes quizzes and tests that don’t involve active learning, which is in line with the Remote Humanities suggestions for remote assessment. Instead, he suggests keeping in mind what purpose you want an assessment to serve, and implementing different strategies that fit that goal. Here are some of Ahmet’s examples:

GOAL: Understand how well students are mastering or understanding course content.

• Multiple-choice quizzes
  • Give students multiple attempts
  • Encourage review of the relevant content between attempts
• Discussion post
  • Students reflect on what they got right and wrong

Communicate to students that these quizzes and tests are about practice for them, and checkpoints for you to see where they need help with certain concepts.

Grading: The results of these quizzes should minimally impact the final grade.

GOAL: Assess students’ ability to put in practice the knowledge they learn in the course.

• Make the assessment tasks or assignments open-ended
  • Students put their knowledge into practice by themselves or in collaboration with classmates
  • They use external resources or materials to prepare for the task
• Develop a corresponding rubric to define criteria to evaluate students’ work and always use that rubric to grade them.
• Provide students with feedback

Communicate to students that these assessments are a way for students to be exposed to and start building the skill set that they would encounter in real-life situations that the course intends to prepare them for.

Grading: These assessments and assignments should have a higher impact on the final course grade.

 GOAL: Assess the extent to which students have reached end-of-course goals.

• Open-ended exam questions where students construct the meaning themselves.
• Allow students to use external resources when possible (if you decide to administer the assessment as a final course project).
• Develop a corresponding rubric to define criteria to evaluate students’ work and always use that rubric to grade them.

Communicate to students that the role of this end-of-course or final assessment and/or project is a way for students to perform what they have learned in the class to indicate if they have reached the intended outcomes.

Grading: The results of this final assessment and/or final project should have a high impact on the final course grade.

Although this may seem daunting, Ahmet Dursun believes that remote assessment gives instructors two important benefits. “First,” he says, “remote assessment will help us pause, reflect, and re-think the role of classroom assessment and re-evaluate its effectiveness. We are in constant motion when we teach and do not have much time to pause, reflect, and revise. The needs for remote teaching have challenged us to think and innovate differently. That will push us to critically look at our teaching and assessment practices, and keep only what is most useful and effective.”

“The second benefit I see is with regard to expanded and strategic use of technologies to deliver instruction and assessment practices. We have been introduced to new technologies and tools that we would not consider otherwise, while our students have naturally encountered these tools and engaged with them as a means of communication, both socially and professionally. Embracing these technologies and using them strategically for teaching and testing purposes will enable to us to function in a domain that our students are already competent in and need to be prepared for to function within a 21st-century workplace.”

 Ahmet Dursun is the Director of the Office of Language Assessment, where he is responsible for researching, developing, and managing the University’s language assessment programs. He is co-founder of the Language Pedagogy Innovation Initiative (LPII) at the University of Chicago where he has been designing and leading workshops in second language assessment and pedagogy. His work on computer-assisted language teaching, testing research and practice, and test validation have appeared in multiple peer-reviewed journals, edited volumes, and books.